A number of months ago a fishing boat containing four football players—two NFL and two college players--capsized off the coast of Miami. The boat turned over in heavy seas. Initially all four players clung to the side of the upside down boat waiting for rescue. After about three hours one of the NFL players told the others that he quit, and then took off his life vest, let go of the boat, and allowed the waves to carry him out to sea. Shortly afterwards the other NFL player did the exact same. Both had reached the end of their tether and simply gave up.
A third player held on until the next day, when he thought he saw a light in the distance and let go of the boat to swim to it. He was never seen again. The fourth player climbed on top of the boat and was rescued after two days at sea; hypothermic, but alive.
A friend of mine noted that the three hours that the NFL players held on is the approximate length of a football game. Perhaps this is most likely a coincidence, but it reminded me of a documentary I saw about the Navy Seals. Navy Seal training is by far the most difficult in the military. During Hell week they go for three straight days without any sleep at all, and then get two hours a night of sleep for the next four days. In between they are kept wet, cold, tired and constantly moving.
Navy Seal instructors have found that strength athletes, such as football players, are not the most likely to make it through the training. Endurance athletics do much better than strength athletes because Navy Seal training requires the ability to perform for long periods of time in miserable conditions. In fact, the Navy Seals often have a recruiting table at triathlons. Is it possible that football training developed a psychological resiliency duration of three hours among the NFL players?
A couple of years ago I heard a fascinating keynote address at the CPM conference by Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez, who talked about the importance of caring for the psychological needs of workers during an emergency. He ran the temporary hospital at the New Orleans airport after Katrina. As part of their operations they had a red phone that was solely used by staff to call their family or friends. Eventually some FEMA bureaucrat decided that the phone was against regulations and removed it. Productivity immediately fell.
Business continuity experts spend a great amount of time setting up the systems and procedures to continue operations during a business disruption, but less time is spent preparing for the psychological needs of the employees that will be put under tremendous pressure during a crisis. They often assume that employees will simply do as their told. But if your community is struck by a disaster, you will care for your family before your employer. Most of the police force in New Orleans disappeared after Katrina because they cared for their family before their civic duty.
Human resiliency is becoming a hot topic within business continuity, and hopefully we’ll see it given more attention in the future.
Last Week’s Quiz Question:
Undergraduate students who live a military lifestyle at Norwich are called “Cadets.” What are Cadets called when they first enter the university as freshman?
The answer is Rooks. Rooks walk in the gutter, navigating around upper classmen, when they first come to Norwich University until they are “recognized,” which normally comes around Thanksgiving of their first year.
The winner is Andrey N. Chernyaev. Congratulation Andrey!
This Week’s Quiz Question:
Name either of the two Vermont towns that is also the name of a foreign capital (Note: Moscow, Vermont is not a town, just a location).
The winner will receive a coveted Information Assurance Practitioner Beanie Baby.
It's an interesting idea, although I wonder if the theory falls apart when you consider that the lone survivor was a college football player who also would probably have been conditioned to last 3 hours (not to mention he was a college student, which more likely than not includes a party-heavy lifestyle). So was it his conditioning, sheer will-power, or dumb luck, that enabled him to last? If I were going to go with the conditioning theory, I think I'd expect the college players to give up before the NFL players.
ReplyDeletePerhaps with the other players gone, there was simply more room for the remaining player to maneuver onto the top of the boat where he didn't have to expend so much energy hanging on?